


Cryptopaleontology

by anistarrose



Series: Stan Twins Birthday Event 2018 [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Family Fluff, Gen, don't pay too much attention the paleontology here, ford is a hopeless nerd, normally i would do more research but i didn't have time this week, so there will probably be some inaccuracies, stan is a smartass, very mild swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 16:26:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15100619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anistarrose/pseuds/anistarrose
Summary: Ford finds an anomalous fossil, and Stan realizes he has a weird talent.





	Cryptopaleontology

**Author's Note:**

> An even mix of fluff and humor, because Axolotl knows I've been putting these poor old men through enough pain and suffering lately.
> 
> Written for the Stan Twins Birthday Event Week 4: Comfort/Praise, specifically the praise part.

Stan had only looked away for a few seconds. It shouldn’t have been enough time for even _Ford_ to get stuck in a situation that he’d need rescuing from.

But one moment, Ford had been standing about ten feet away from Stan in the meadow, and the next, he was gone without a trace.

The area around them was a little hilly, but definitely not enough to hide an adult man, and it stayed that way for hundreds of feet in every direction. And there weren’t any trees or bushes, either.

“Ford?” Stan yelled, trying not to panic. “Where are you?”

Thankfully, he heard Ford’s unmistakable voice reply. “Stan, what’s wrong?”

Stan ran towards the voice, Ford still nowhere in sight. “I can’t see where you are at _all_ , Poindexter! Where the hell did you — whoa!”

He stopped just in time to keep himself from falling on Ford’s face. There was a cave below him, its entrance difficult to spot thanks to the uneven ground. And at the bottom, after about a six-foot drop, Ford was kneeling on the ground, grinning like an idiot and holding a weirdly shaped rock.

“A new record,” Stan grumbled.

“Pardon?” Ford asked.

“I looked away for like five seconds. Your old record for getting into trouble and needin’ me to save you was in fifteen seconds. If I’d known you were gonna do this, I would have brought my stopwatch to —”

“I don’t need saving!” Ford replied, somehow managing to sound indignant and excited at the same time. “I jumped down here intentionally, because I saw something —”

“Yeah, well on purpose or not, how do you think you’re gonna get back out?” Stan asked.

“Well, I’ll climb out, of course!” Ford told him, and Stan made a mental note to force Ford to get his eyes checked, because that cave did not look like something you could just _climb_ out of. “Now come down so I can show you what I found!”

“I’ll pass, thanks,” Stan said. “I don’t want us both to be stuck. Just tell me what it is already. I can tell you’re dying to talk about it.”

“They’re fossils of a prehistoric anomaly!” Ford raised the item he’d been holding so Stan could see that it was a bone. “I couldn’t tell what they were at first, but now, looking at the skull, I’m sure that it’s something completely unknown to science!”

Stan was trying to stay pissed, but Ford’s nerdy enthusiasm was contagious, and he couldn’t help but smile as Ford rambled on while unearthing the remaining bones.

“Obviously I don’t have access to radiometric dating at the moment, but the rock it’s embedded in is certainly centuries old at the very least. This may even be a member of an entire extinct species of anomaly that lived and died before humankind itself ever walked this planet!”

“Yeesh, you’re dramatic,” Stan muttered. “Are any of your PhDs even in paleontology or whatever it’s called?”

“Actually, no. I only have a master’s. And I did technically get that one in Exxrike 11-D, but their planet has very similar geology to Earth so it definitely still counts.”

It took about ten minutes for Ford to safely gather the entire skeleton, and when he was finished he wrapped the pieces in his jacket and placed it in his backpack.

“It would be safer, as well as more traditional, to transport them in plaster,” he explained. “But that would take too long to prepare. Also, we don’t have any plaster.”

Stan snorted and took a few steps back, remaining close enough to see what he knew was coming next.

There was an awkward lull in the conversation as Ford ran his hands over the walls of the cave, then briefly tried to pull himself up by the rim of the entrance, quickly abandoning the attempt when a large clump of dirt hit him in the face.

“Um,” he said quietly, “I… I may have underestimated the concavity of these walls, while simultaneously overestimating the both the number of footholds and the stability of the entrance.”

“That’s nerd speak for ‘I’m stuck,’ isn’t it?”

“...Maybe a little bit. In my defense, it’s dark down here.”

“You understand the price for throwing you a rope is me getting the right to say ‘I told you so’ until the end of time, right?”

“All too well, I’m afraid.”

*******

“I’m an idiot,” Ford announced that evening as Stan returned to their hotel room with the takeout they’d ordered.

Stan shrugged. “Eh, only sometimes. You just pack your brain too full of nerd stuff and don’t leave any room for common sense. Like when you jumped into that cave.”

“That’s not at all how the human memory works, Stan,” Ford chided. “But sadly, you may have a point about the common sense. I completely forgot to record the arrangement of the skeleton, and now I have no idea how it fits together.” He shook his head. “Irreplaceable data, lost forever because I couldn’t contain my excitement!”

Stan sat down at the table Ford was working on. “Hey, don’t worry. I’m sure we can figure it out.” 

He picked up the skull, which looked somewhat catlike except for the small curved tusks growing out of it, and set it aside from everything else. “This is its head, so we start here, right?”

Ford nodded, and gestured to about a dozen smaller bones that he’d lined up together. “These are the vertebrae, but the sizes are wildly inconsistent. I’m beginning to wonder if there were actually two specimens that died in close proximity…”

“Maybe,” Stan said, moving the vertebrae closer to the skull and reordering a few of them. “Or maybe, Sixer, it’s just an even weirder anomaly than you thought it was at first.”

He picked up two leg bones, held them up next to each other to make sure they fit together, and set them down in place near the skull and vertebrae. Next, he arranged the ribs. About half of them were a lot smaller, so he added them to the end along with the smallest vertebrae, like a tail.

“Wonder if this thing was just a baby when it died,” he suggested. “Weren’t all the Ice Age animals supposed to be freakishly huge?”

“Yes, there were quite a few examples of megafauna. You may be right,” Ford replied slowly, not taking his eyes off Stan’s work.

Stan, for his part, thought it was pretty easy. It was like throwing together taxidermied abominations at the Mystery Shack, except here, the parts were actually meant to fit together, as different as they looked. It just took an open mind to see how.

When he finished, it was pretty obvious he’d done it correctly, as the creature looked bizarre, yet functional. It had the skull of a cat, except with small curved tusks like a mammoth, the front legs of a bird, the hind legs of a horse, the tail of a snake, and some kind of protective shell like an armadillo — or as Ford would later speculate, a glyptodon. 

“So, uh, does this look right to you?” Stan asked, unable to read the expression on Ford’s face for once.

Ford was silent for a moment. Then finally, he asked: “Stanley, how did you _do_ that?”

For a second Stan thought he’d gotten it all wrong, but the tone in Ford’s voice wasn’t disapproval. It was more like awe.

“I just… I guess I’m used to seeing weird stuff spliced together, in the Shack, and even though that stuff’s usually not real… I kinda gave up on this fossil actually making _sense_ , you know? And after that, I could just _tell_ what went where, once I stopped caring about how weird it was and just about what fit together.”

“This is a genuine prehistoric chimera, spliced together from animals that are likely all extinct now.” The excited smile was back on Ford’s face. “This has the potential to usher in an entirely new era of cryptozoology — no, crypto _paleontology_ — but _I_ couldn’t make heads or tails of it. You have a gift for this, Stanley!”

“Wait, what?” Stan was taken aback. “You’ve gotta be exaggerating! My only talents have to do with money, or doin’ illegal stuff, or both.”

“I’d never exaggerate about something like this, Stanley!” Ford told him. Then with a grin on his face, he added: “I may be the one with six fingers, but like it or not, you’re the one who’s just messed up enough to see weird, anomalous things for what they really are. That’s why we make the best team!”

“Aw, come on, Poindexter! When did you become such a sappy old man?”

“Sappiness comes naturally for everyone with age. You’re proud of yourself too, don’t try to deny it!”

“Fine,” Stan admitted. “It’s kinda cool to know I’m good at _some_ kind of sciencey stuff.”

“I guess I’ll have to credit you when I publish our findings!”

“Don’t you dare! I don’t want the whole world to think I’m a nerd like you!”

Ford snorted. “If you got to make an entire town believe that Stanford Pines ran a tourist trap for three decades, then I think I have the right to make some cryptozoology enthusiasts believe Stanley Pines is an expert paleontologist.”

Stan gently punched Ford in the arm, but even he had to admit that didn’t sound half-bad.

He realized it had been a long time since Ford had praised him for something small. Calling him a hero for stopping Weirdmageddon didn’t count, because that situation had been too stressful for Stan to really appreciate it. The same went for all the times that Ford had almost gotten killed fighting sea monsters and thanked Stan for saving him.

But Ford actually telling him he was good at something — that hadn’t happened regularly since they were teenagers. Stan wasn’t the best at responding to praise when it came from people he really cared about, but he couldn’t help but smile for the rest of the evening.

**Author's Note:**

> My fic for this week was initially going to be more hurt/comfort, but it ended up not featuring not enough comfort relative to the hurt, so I wrote this in a day instead. All things considered, I’m pretty happy how it turned out, though since I didn’t do much research I’m sure you can find some paleontological inaccuracies if you look hard enough.
> 
> (I may polish up the original idea one day and actually post it. I’m not really sure when, though.)
> 
> Comments are appreciated as always!


End file.
